Forensic folly
The lead prosecutor, Colin Boyd, was also involved in an earlier forensic disaster when the fingerprint evidence against Detective Constable Shirley McKie was thrown out and the she was acquitted.
One of the foremost critics of the trial is the famous criminal lawyer Michael Mansfield, who has long warned against over-reliance on forensic evidence to secure convictions.
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Hide AdHe said: “Some of the worst miscarriages of justice in British legal history have come from cases in which the forensic science was later shown to have been grossly misleading.”
The idea of a long-timer bomb starting at Malta in a piece of unaccompanied baggage before finding its way on to Pan Am 103 is beyond absurdity.
There is no proof it entered at Malta – in fact, Air Malta won a libel action establishing it did not – and the evidence of a Heathrow-loaded barometric device is overwhelming.
(Dr) John Cameron
Howard Place
St Andrews
I do not understand the Megrahi deniers (Letters, 23 December). If Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was not responsible for Lockerbie that means that after 26 years the Scottish Government has failed to hold a single person accountable for the murder of 270 people in Scotland’s worst terrorist atrocity.
That surely is a definition of “miscarriage of justice”.
This is compounded by the fact that it prematurely released the person it thought was responsible and then sought to spin the news of his release by writing to Nelson Mandela et al to encourage them to endorse the decision.
Miscarriage of justice compounded.
Neil Sinclair
Clarence Street
Edinburgh